Nine nabs Big Bang episodes back

EXCLUSIVE: Nine has finalised a deal to nab back broadcast rights for all episodes of The Big Bang Theory.

In 2015 Seven swooped on rerun rights of archival episodes, leaving Nine with new episodes, and ran them on several channels. But in recent months they have disappeared off Seven as Nine finalised a new deal to be the Free to Air exclusive home for the entire brand.

“All the Big Bangs are back on Nine,” Nine Network Program Director Hamish Turner said.

“Every episode. Every new episode.”

At various times, both Nine & Seven have taken pot-shots at the amount of episodes flogged by their competitors, so it will be interesting to see how frequently it plays from this point.

Last year Nine also dabbled with repeats of new episodes barely two hours after they debuted on the same channel.

“Not everybody is home at 7:30,” Turner continued.

“With that style of show there are plenty of options for people to view content, so it’s another bite of the cherry and it doesn’t cost us any money. It doesn’t count as a run, more specifically.”

This year Nine will also debut spin-off show Young Sheldon which has already been greenlit for a second season.

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23 Comments:

Would love to see them play every episode from the beginning, in order, something like 7pm weeknights on 9GO! until it gets to current episodes – each season about a month on that basis so would run for nearly a year. This is better than playing 4,5,6 episodes at once on multiple nights of the week where you end up only watching a few, if any.

Something that is worth a mention. Depsite Seven losing Big Bang re-runs, they actually still have a deal with Warner Bros International Television for films. They’re picking them up from Nine on a weekly basis!

Seven paid $16m for exclusive rights to TBBT repeats for just 3 years, just at the point when the numbers for both repeat and new episodes started to plummet. They ended up running them non-stop on Seven Flix just to try and get something out of the deal. It may have been a PR triumph, but it was was a bad economic decision. Now they have dropped them and Nine has them back again.

The repeats are worth more to Nine because they can use them with the new eps. And once the show is cancelled they will be able to strip the early episodes one more time for people to watch (before they are repeat on cable and streaming services for ever).

My guess would be late February once the Twenty/20 Cricket is done, Nine are currently 5 episodes behind the US due to the 3 and one week breaks the show has taken. Aired there Dec 07th, 14th, Jan 04th, 11th 18th, next Feb 01st with another break after that for a few of weeks, so if it is late Feb Nine will be 6 episodes behind.

Don’t watch it personally but I can’t help but giggle given the amount of comments last year from readers of TVT about the number of episodes played back to back on 7Mate. I wonder what they will do to fill the gap 🙂

Big Bang Theory isn’t a CBS property, it’s a Warner Brothers property that CBS has broadcast rights for. CBS really has nothing to do with the show other than broadcast in the U.S and deciding whether it gets another season or not.

Young Sheldon, TBBT are owned by Warner Bros. CBS only has USA TV rights. These are not “CBS properties”. Nine retained rights to 60 Minutes on a ‘first look’ basis when CBS News switched from Nine to TEN. In other words, TEN can only have 60 Minutes bits that Nine doesn’t want.

“Last year Nine also dabbled with repeats of new episodes barely two hours after they debuted on the same channel.”

Off the top of your head David, did you notice if that was successful? I know it was really weird.

The biggest current news in FTA comedy AFAIAC is SBS 2 starting Brooklyn Nine-Nine from the beginning with 2 episodes per week night. Looking at the US ratings I can’t see B99 getting renewed for a sixth season.

Nine were getting a couple of hundred thousand extra viewings of TBBT episodes by repeating them on Tuesday nights later in prime time. And as Turner points out it cost them nothing. Nine kept doing do it so it must have been profitable for them.